


Winter Dreams the Same Dream Every Time

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Drinking & Talking, F/M, Interrogation, Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-02
Updated: 2013-01-02
Packaged: 2017-11-23 10:52:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/621305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He forgets she used to be an interrogator. Written for the Irrelevant Gift Exchange on Tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Winter Dreams the Same Dream Every Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift for speakingmysteries! Hope you like it.
> 
> fyi, the song mentioned near the end of the fic is "You Can Never Hold Back Spring," by Tom Waits. So. You know. Mood music.

When she asks him for a drink after the Texas incident, it’s innocent. They’re partners, after all. In all the months they’ve worked together, they’ve never once gone out for drinks after work, but it seems like the kind of thing they would eventually have done, even if things had never changed.

So he makes a little joke about no raw egg in his, and he glows at her for a moment. It’s a fuzzy, molten-edged moment of weakness, a sudden soft spot in the hard shell of fronts and lies that surround him, quickly and casually tilted away. Not hidden or snatched away, just momentarily acknowledged and then taken away just as quickly. _This is here. It isn’t always._

He clears his desk for the night, maybe a little bit faster than usual, and she does the same, and she gets to keep her eyes down and pretend she isn’t laying a snare.

 

***

She doesn’t mistrust him. She can’t afford to. He’s her partner. Even though it’s never ended well with any of the ones who came before him, she has to lean on him. And he’s been good to lean on.  He’s been careful and dependable and when her mind becomes too high and sharp and clean, he ruthlessly drags her back down and reminds her of the world they’re working in. Even early on, when she only suspected him of crookedness, when she only disliked him for his shifty eyes and his liar’s smile and his too-intense conversations with a phone he held close to his face, cupped in a hand that also covered the movements of his mouth, even then he was a friend or close enough.

Now that they’re on the same page, they sometimes trade half-crazed, relieved grins across their desks because thank god, at least they aren’t alone. And if she can’t talk to him about the thousand tiny panics that creep in when she’s trying to sleep or when she’s just not working hard enough, if she can’t say a single word about those because pride and professionalism stop up her mouth, at least in those brief, lunatic smiles, she knows he feels those panics too, in the quieter moments of his life.

So, no, she doesn’t mistrust him.

She just needs to know what he’s done.

 

***

He doesn’t suspect anything. He smiles and orders a beer and is sweet to the girl tending bar. Not in a leering, slithering kind of way, like he thinks he stands a chance with this sweaty, exhausted 22-year-old, but like he knows he doesn’t, and it’s fine by him. He flirts, easy and unserious, and then turns back to Carter. For a moment, it’s like he forgot who he came here with, what they’re doing here, and he founders. He picks his patter up again just as quickly, but the moment of utter loss is there. “So,” he says, as he tilts the heavy glass mug back against his lips, “How was Texas?”

“Too hot,” she says, “and I’m pretty much done with wide open spaces for a while,” but she knows that’s not what he’s asking about. She answers his real question. “He’s quiet to travel with. Doesn’t talk unless he has something to say, won’t go on just to be polite or fill space.”

He swallows a mouthful of beer thoughtfully, a soft crinkle forming between his eyebrows. “That figures,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever had him talk to me and not want something.”

She nods. The guy in the suit likes his little conversations, but they never come without a request, an order, a favor to ask. She adds, innocently, “We shared a hotel room.”

His eyes widen only slightly; the wrinkles in the corner of his mouth deepen for a moment and he lets out a small, wet cough.  “Is this a conversation we should be having, Carter?” he asks.

“Not like that,” she reassures. “It was a busy couple of days. We weren’t ever asleep in that room at the same time.”

“If you say so.” He tries to hide a satisfied smile with the rim of his mug. He’s not good at hiding it.

She says, “He was a gentleman.”

He snorts bitterly into his mug.

“You guys don’t get along, do you?”

She’s only seen the two of them together in jagged moments between bigger, more important things. She’s seen Fusco snarl at him like a dog that won’t stand to be kicked again. She’s seen John’s smile when he speaks to Fusco, smooth and serene and aimed like an attack. She’s also seen them tease each other like brothers. She doesn’t know if she sees the whole picture yet, but like when she was a kid and she’d paint secret messages and little birds on sheets of paper in lemon juice and then give them to her little brother to hold up to a flame, it’s forming gradually. It’s one of the things she feels like she needs to know.

His laugh is low and dry, the kind of laugh you do when something is more sad than funny. “It’s tricky,” he says. “Maybe I’ll tell you about it sometime.”

“What’s wrong with now?” she asks.

His eyes fall to the pitted, warped grain of the bar. “He’s a pain in the ass,” he says. “But I guess he’s okay. He’s on the right side, anyway.”

She makes a sound like that solves everything and she moves on. She asks how Fusco’s son is doing in school and that softens him right up, brings his smiles back and uncoils him from his defensive hunch. She talks about Taylor in turn, and the dark patch of John is mostly faded from the conversation.

After a while, she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. On the way there, once she’s out of his line of sight, she grabs a waitress and tips her $50 if she’ll only make sure that Fusco doesn’t go thirsty tonight.

 

***

“I don’t hate him,” Fusco admits, the words half-lost in his palm from where it’s smooshed against his cheek.

“Yeah?” she says, gently prodding him onward.

“Wish I did,” he mumbles. “This’d be easy if I did. ‘Cause he’d be making me do it all. Wouldn’t be my fault. I wouldn’t have to notice it. How it’s changing me.”

“Changing you how, Fusco?”

He presses his lips together hard, until they go white at the edges. “I thought he made me weak at first. Too scared to do what needed to be done or stand up for me and mine. Now I think he just made me different. Like, forced me back into being someone I used to be.” He rolls his round, broad shoulders. “I like some of it.”

“Some of it?”

“Most of it,” he amends. “I sleep a little better at night.”

She doesn’t. A soft burning coal of senseless envy flares up in her heart.

“So I guess in spite of what he did to me, I owe him.” Fusco seems to deflate at that. He collapses against the bar, looking smaller and softer.

She reaches out and splays a hand across his broad back, presses so her blunt, regulation-smooth fingernails tickle soothingly through the back of his jacket. He exhales sharply and she can feel his flesh crawl through the cheap material. “How did you two meet?”

He laughs again. He says in a voice low and secret, “That’s a good story.” But he makes no move to tell it.

He doesn’t start talking until after Carter makes sharp, flinty eye contact with that waitress from before and Fusco has a nice, frosty glass slapped wet and cold against the rough pads of his palm.

“This was.” He hums thoughtfully. “Christ, almost a year ago now. I was working with – well, I won’t tell you who I was working with. But it was bad. You knew that, right?” He sneaks eye contact with her from beneath his brows.

She nods, turns toward him. “I thought so,” she admits. “There were rumors about you.”

“Hah.” It’s not a laugh, just a sharp breath that ruffles the dark, placid surface of his beer. “Yeah. All good stuff, right?” His voice crackles.

“Sure.” She gives him a friendly punch on his upper arm, more a firm brush of her knuckles. “You’re a stand-up guy, Fusco. Nothin’ shady about you. IAB’s only given you trouble…what? Three times?”

He grins into his hand. “Okay, okay. You can lay off.”

She gives him another non-punch on the arm. “Tell your story, Fusco.”

“Okay,” he repeats. “So the guy in the suit, he was making trouble for the people I was working for.”

“See, already you lost me,” she says into her own drink. “That’s not the John I know.”

“You wanna hear the story or what?” he snaps.

“Alright,” she says. “I’ll stop teasing you.”

“Thanks,” he says. “So they caught him sniffing around, roughed him up a little, turned him over to me to…to keep an eye on. Keep him out of the way, you know?”

She nods. He pauses again for a little while, like he’s working his way through a bad thought, lips moving almost imperceptibly. She wants to nudge him, give him a jump start, but she’s been laying it on pretty thick these past few minutes. Better to let him get there on his own.

He’s scraping his index fingernail along a soft line in the wood of the bar, gouging deeper. “Just keeping him out of the way,” he continues, softly, “so I had him in the back of my car when he woke up. And I figured he’d wake up sooner or later; I wasn’t worried or anything. We got to talking. Probably the most polite we’ve ever been with each other.”

“You have nice little chats with all your prisoners like that?”

“Sure,” he says, a little too brightly. “Least I can do, you know? It’s a long drive.”

“Where to?”

He clams up again. His brow furrows. “If I didn’t know you better, Carter,” he says, voice all bitter and guarded but sloppy, “I’d say you took me out just to grill me about stuff I don’t wanna talk about. And I think I know you pretty well.”

She sighs. Pushed it too hard. Assumed he was drunker than he was. Bad play. But not unsalvageable. The easy way out is to lie, tell him that of course she wasn’t trying to grill him and if he doesn’t want to talk about it, he doesn’t have to. They could talk about their kids again, or talk about exes, or trade stupid work anecdotes because she’s still got a few that he hasn’t heard yet and she knows he has a million of them. But she’s not going to lie. She’s going to take the hard way out. Because the point of tonight was honesty, and she has no right to expect it from him if she can’t pull it off herself. She lets her fingertips slide over the back of his hand. “Nobody knows anybody,” she says. “Not that well.”

His hand beneath hers balls up into a fist. “Guess not,” he says.

She lets the side of her thumb graze across his thick hand, feel the soft, thin dusting of nearly invisible red-gold hair that’s spread across the back of it, coming up from his wrist. “Did you know I used to be an army interrogator?”

He swallows, hard and dry. “Yeah,” he says. “I think I heard that somewhere.”

 

***

It’s the worst silence that’s ever hung between them. Carter thinks they would have moved past it by now if they were somewhere quiet, if she’d followed him home or brought him back to hers, or if they were just in a place less full of other people’s chatter and the sorrowful, rough-voiced crowing of the kinds of singers that get played in a bar like this.

“So, what do you want to know?” he asks. “You wanna clear the air? Let’s…let’s do that. Pick your poison.”

“Well, for starters,” she begins, “I think you lied to me just now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yup.”

“Hey! You’re right. Good job. You’re a human lie detector. You could go on daytime talk shows like that. Make a bundle.” He takes an angry pull of his beer, wobbles on the barstool.

He’s puffing up. Like he does when Reese is poking at him, hunting out sore spots. Like he never is with her.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry, but you need to understand where I’m coming from with this. I like you, Fusco, I really do, but you’ve got this whole past. All this shady, nasty history that it seems like everybody knows but me. And I’ve gotta know. I need to trust you.”

He lowers his head.

“Come on, Fusco. How would you feel if you knew nothing about me, if people kept talking about me like I’d done something awful, like I was dirty, like I’d…like I’d killed somebody, like you were a fool to be trusting me at all. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t have a few questions for me.”

His head is still down. His face is stony and etched over with lines and she can tell he’s trying hard not to move it too much. Tersely he says, “I wouldn’t.”

She blinks at him, thinks a moment. “No,” she says, “maybe you wouldn’t.” She looks at him very hard.

He wouldn’t, because even with his snappishness and his stories he can’t bear to tell, he’s all trust. He’s scrambling to put his faith and devotion in somebody, and he’s not choosy about who it is. It doesn’t matter whether they’re right or wrong, whether they’re good or bad, just if they put a little faith in him, if they seem like they have plans for him and his place in the universe.

He’s guarding himself badly as he looks up at her. “Guess you’re thinking I’m an idiot for that.”

“No.” She tries putting a hand on his shoulder and he flinches, but doesn’t try to brush her off. She sinks her fingers in gratefully. “You’re just a babe in the woods.”

He snorts. “That’s rich coming from somebody who’s only corrupt so they can be a superhero on the side.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means the sun shines out of your ass,” he snaps.

He keeps his bitter, hard face firmly on as she collapses into his side laughing, rattling their barstools together like shaky, top-heavy dominoes, but even that fades away after a time and he starts to drink again, slow and steady. “I just don’t know if I can tell you this story. It’s not like telling another dirty cop or the guy in the suit. There’s an understanding, ‘cause you both screwed up pretty bad, and it’s nobody’s fault but yours and now you have to just deal with it.” He shakes his head.

“You aren’t like that. You’ve never screwed up like I screwed up. Hearing about it’ll only make you hate me.”

“Try me,” she says. She orders her second beer of the night.

 

***

“So, where was I?” he asks.

“You were lying to me about what you were sent to do with John.”

He winces. “Do I have to say it? In public, with people around and all? You know what I had him in my car for. Hell, you probably know where I was taking him. You know it all. Don’t make me rehash it.”

“I don’t know where you were taking him,” she says. “That’s why I asked.”

He scopes out the bar, furtive and way too obvious. “Oyster Bay,” he mutters once he’s satisfied that no one’s listening in.

“What’s at Oyster Bay?”

“Nothing. Whole lot of nothing. Just sand and cold beach and lots of empty space. If you…if you were gonna bury something out there – and I’m not gonna tell you what to bury on your own time – nobody would find it for a long while. Long enough that the crabs and the birds and the water and the sand would make it pretty tough to ID whatever it was to start with.”

“And what would you bury, Fusco?” she asks. “Hypothetically.”

His voice is so quiet, so far back in his throat that it’s barely more than a breath when he says, “A body.”

“Okay.” She shifts in her seat, leans forward. She puts an arm around him again, shakes him a little. “Good. Now we’re getting somewhere.”

 

***

But they don’t go any further until he’s had something more to drink. He is listing gently against her shoulder when he says, “That was my job. One of ‘em. Wore a lot…a lot of hats in my time. It was mostly bad stuff. I don’t even mean ethically, like they were bad things, although they were. Just that it was lousy work. Stuff nobody wanted to do because it was hard or boring and nobody wants to be out in the middle of the goddamn night digging a six by four by six hole in goddamn sand. Or because you couldn’t really finish the job without feeling kinda sick. Even if you didn’t care what you’d done, there’s some nasty little jobs hidden in there, ones that don’t occur to you straight off. ‘Cause it helped if nobody could ever ID the guy, so you’d have to, you know, make sure fingerprints and dental records wouldn’t be any good.” He’s being frustratingly obtuse, but Carter’s pretty sure she gets it. Fusco blinks hopelessly at her and makes an awful, yanking gesture and, yeah, she gets it alright. He nods, solemn, and returns to his slumped position against her arm. “I don’t know,” he says. “At least you were out by the ocean. Then it all just smelled like seawater.” He sighs.

She takes a very long, serious drink, and thinks for a while about what her next question should be and whether she should just pull out her barstool and leave. Finally, she asks, “Why was it your job? Were you good at it?”

“No,” he says. “I mean, I got better at digging, after a while. But I never had an easy way with the whole thing. I never got comfortable. I just drew the short straw a lot of the time, or else I volunteered. Because I’m _dependable_.” He spits and then seems surprised at himself. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “Go on.”

“I used to lie in court,” he says. “And that was alright. Probably wasn’t any better than the other stuff, but at least I didn’t have to watch it happen. Just go in, dress nice, say my bit, and it’s all over. Painless. I guess most things are, at a distance.” He begins to smile to himself. “He used to say I’d get soft, going to court all the time. Soft in the gut, soft in the heart.”

“He?”

“Friend of mine.” The smile vanishes. “He’s dead now.”

She decides that she’s not going to ask about it. She’s ripped open enough old wounds tonight.

Although, if he decides to tell the rest of that story on his own, she wouldn’t mind hearing it. “Sorry to hear that,” she says, because that’s what you say.

“Eh.” He shrugs. “You would have hated him.”

She thinks it’s probably true, but some deep-down, fundamental part of her knows that you’re not supposed to say things like that about the dead, so she winces on behalf of Fusco’s dead friend who she probably would have hated.

“So,” he asks. “Do you hate me, now that you know? ‘Cause if you don’t yet, I’m sure I could come up with some other stuff, if you gave me a little time. Not like I’m hurting for examples or anything.”

“Stop it,” she says. “I don’t hate you.”

“Jesus,” he says. “Why not?”

She thinks for a moment. Really thinks, because she realizes she has to. “I think I just hate the other guy,” she says. “Not your friend; the guy you used to be.”

“I’m still that guy,” Fusco says. “I thought the same then as I do now; I just didn’t have the stones to do anything about it.”

“You do now. You’ve changed.”

“Only because he made me. Him and you.”

“Before tonight, I never made you do anything.”

“Not on purpose,” he says. His face is going red, but maybe it’s just the beers. “You go around like you’re trying to save the world, and I don’t think I can do that, you know, I’m not crazy…”

“And I am?”

“No.” He says it like it’s a fundamental law and he shouldn’t have to explain it to her. “It just reminds me of how much catching up I gotta do. You’re a lot of work to keep up with.”

She struggles for a moment to say anything about that. Something honest, because he’s been honest with her, maybe more than he meant to be, and she wants to be honest with him, to find someone she can talk to and not pretend to be on one side of this or the other, someone as unsure and adrift as she is. Her arm is slung across his back and she tightens it, so it slides up the slopes of his shoulders and around his neck. She drags him as close as she can without pulling him off his seat, close enough that their heads knock together. Close enough that he brings one hand up to push her hair out of both of their faces.

He takes that silky, tangled bundle of her hair and sweeps it over her shoulder, presses it to the back of her head, his fingers curling against her scalp. His fingers relax, one by one, let her hair fall down her back, but they keep moving, petting. “Soft,” he mumbles with a kind of drunken distance.

She didn’t go into this intending to kiss him. She’s not even sure it’s the right thing to do, under the circumstances. But she finds that she wants to, and Carter hasn’t gotten much that she wanted lately. The kiss is slow and boozy and Carter gets the idea that Fusco doesn’t mind being victimized just this once.

When they let each other go, he sits up, curiously straight-backed. He blinks at her, all shocked clarity. “I’m really confused,” he says, frank as you please.

“Yeah.” She pats his shoulder. “Me too.”

He taps his palms against the bar, beats a short, inaudible tattoo. “So, what now?”

“’Nother drink?” she asks him, at a loss.

“Nah. No, I think I’ve had enough for one night.” He rubs his brow. “I’m gonna be feeling this in the morning.”

“Sorry.” A song starts up somewhere, soft piano and drunken horn and a singer who sounds like he gargles with razor blades and rot-gut whiskey. She kinda likes it. She taps his arm. “Wanna dance or something?”

He fixes her with stare, eyebrows all lopsided. “That’s not gonna make anybody less confused.”

“So we’ll be confused. Come on.”

He’s starting to smile at her again, even though she can tell he doesn’t buy it. “Hope you haven’t mistaken me for Fred Astaire,” he says as he struggles off the stool and stands unsteadily on planet Earth again.

“Honey,” she says, dismounting neatly from her own seat. “I wouldn’t even mistake you for Kevin Bacon.”

“Ow. Haven’t you hurt me enough for one night?”

She takes his hand and pulls him to an empty patch of floor by the jukebox. It’s not a dance floor, because this isn’t the kind of place where people dance, but it’s open and it’s not a place where anybody’s walking or playing darts, so they’re in the clear. They don’t pull close, but they kind of fall together, so they’re tilted into each other, Carter’s arms in a slack loop around his neck, his hands resting around her hips, but no lower. It’s not dancing, exactly, what they do. They rock together, drunk and quiet, in vague time with the sad and hopeful dirge that’s grinding its way out of the jukebox speakers.

“You want to tell me the rest of the story about how you and John met?” she asks. “Now that the hard part’s over. It is over, right?”

“Yeah.” His chin falls on her shoulder. “The rest of it’s just embarrassing. That I can do.”

“Well,” she says. She rests her cheek on the top of his head just because she’s kind of pleased that she can. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”

“So he woke up in the back seat of my car,” Fusco begins, “and I tell him what’s up.”

“As a courtesy.”

“As a courtesy. And he doesn’t seem too worried, which I think is weird but, whatever, he’s the one in cuffs. Rookie mistake. Anyway, he starts telling me my own life story, like he does when he knows more than you do and he wants to draw it out.”

“I don’t think I ever want to smack him more than when he does that.”

“Good luck with that. Anyway, he says I work for him now. And I’m having a good hard laugh at that when he says I should have been more careful when I was searching him. Christ. It took me a full ten seconds to figure out what he was getting at, and that’s all the time it took for him to light off a flashbang in my face.”

“Is he insane?”

“Yes. So the car flips, I guess, because when I came to I was upside down. Don’t even ask me how I didn’t die right there, because I don’t even have half a clue. Next thing I know, he drags me out of the wreck, steals my keys, and shoots me in the back.”

“What?”

“I had my vest on,” he says like it’s not such a big deal, in hindsight. “He even checked. He’s a real sweetie, right?”

“I’m gonna have words with that sweetie next time I see him,” she mutters.

“Nah.” He lifts his head to catch her eye. “Don’t bother. I owe him, remember?”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

“Trust me.” He wobbles. “It all evens out.”

The song ends. It’s shorter than she thought it would be, and now they’re playing something smoother that she likes less. “I’m gonna have to take your word for it, Fusco. You wanna…?” she asks, jabbing a thumb at the door.

He nods.

 

***

She’s buying and it kills him.

“No,” he says, shaking his head too hard, taking a minute to let his blurring vision settle and sharpen. “No, no, no. At least let me pay half.” His fingers fumble for the bill but she snatches it away, makes him crawl halfway across the bar to get at it before she braces a hand against his shoulder and gives him a shove back into his seat. The stool shudders under him.

“I could pay,” he says miserably.

“I’m the one who made you come out,” she says. “I’m not gonna make you buy.”

“You didn’t make me,” he says. “You never have to make me.”

“I did, though.”

“Yeah,” he says, spinning on a dime into sleepy agreement. “Yeah, but you never had to. I would’ve come anyway. ‘S just a lot of talk.” He makes another grab for the bill and she snaps it out of his reach.

“Don’t you fight me on this,” she says. “I’m treating you.” She carves a deep, colorless gouge into the receipt when she tries to write the tip, scribbles in the corner until the ink flows blue and free.

He mutters into his hands, “Treating me how?”

 

***

They walk with their arms stretched across each other’s shoulders as a crude support system for their weaving walk as they search for a cab home. If Carter’s doing most of the work, and she might be, she doesn’t complain.

It’s a cold night, but their skins are both blazing. “Burning off the booze,” Fusco explains, but he keeps stealing sneaky, sweet looks at her.

The sidewalk wavers beneath her feet and she sits down hard on the curb, the sidewalk biting cold through the back of her pants. Fusco nudges her hip with the side of one scuffed brown loafer and when she doesn’t show any sign of getting up, he sinks down beside her with a soft grunt.

She turns to look at him and for maybe the first time all night, he isn’t trying to hide from her. “Hey,” Carter says.

“Hey.”

“You hate me? Just a little?”

“No!” He almost seems offended. “I can’t do that.”

“If you could,” she persists, “would you?”

That one he actually thinks about. “Still no,” he says, decisively.

“I feel like I took advantage back there. Asking you about that.”

“Yeah,” he says, nodding. “Yeah, probably. Big deal; I’ve had worse done to me by a friend. At least you had a good reason. ‘S not like I couldn’t have just walked out. I didn’t have to answer. I could have lied.”

“Could you have, though?”

“Sure,” he says. “Do it all the time.”

She punches him on the arm again. He punches back.

“Fusco?” she begins. “One more question.”

“Shoot.”

“You sure? I’m not being cute; this is a big one.”

“ _Shoot_ ,” he repeats.

“How many people have you killed?”

His face darkens immediately, but it’s like a passing shadow and he’s asking, like she asked him what kind of ice cream he likes best, “As a cop? Or, just, in my life?”

“In your life,” she says.

He bites his lip in thought, releases it. “I’ve shot four guys in the line of duty,” he says. “That’s not counting dirty work or stuff I do for the Suit. I don’t really want to say more. Can I go over or under?”

“Over or under what?”

He thinks. “How many people have you killed?”

She jumps at that, but then, she supposes it’s fair. “In my life?”

“In your life. Counting military service.”

She thinks about it for a long time. She tallies up a small handful of lives. She tells him.

He nods solemnly, looks up at the sky, at dark clouds under-lit by streetlight. “Well how about that?” he says. “I win.”  



End file.
